Womanpriest

This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Roman Catholic Church strictly forbids women's ordination, arguing that women priests defy God's will for the Church. Enter Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP), an international movement that has ordained nearly 250 women worldwide, mostly in the United States and Canada. The Vatican insists that women have never and can never be priests; RCWP responds by ordaining womenpriests who lead worship communities, perform sacramental ministries, and embody Christ as women. RCWP transgresses official Roman Catholic teaching while seeking to uphold and redeem Roman Catholic traditions-all while provocatively claiming to be Roman Catholic. While some Catholics and even non-Catholics today are asking if priests are necessary, especially given the ongoing sex-abuse scandal, RCWP looks to reframe and reform Roman Catholic priesthood, starting with ordained women. Womanpriest is the first academic study of the RCWP movement. As an ethnography, Womanpriest analyzes the womenpriests' actions and lived theologies in order to explore ongoing tensions in Roman Catholicism around gender and sexuality, priestly authority, and religious change. In order to understand how womenpriests navigate tradition and transgression, this study situates RCWP within post-Vatican II Catholicism, apostolic succession, sacraments, ministerial action, and questions of embodiment. Womanpriest reveals RCWP to be a discrete religious movement in a distinct religious moment, with a small group of tenacious women defying the Catholic patriarchy, taking on the priestly role, and demanding reconsideration of Roman Catholic tradition. Doing so, the women inhabit and recreate the central tensions in Catholicism today.